Lessons in Group Dynamics from a Pack of Toy Soldiers
Macie Aronsky, M.A.
Doctoral Student
The George Washington University Professional Psychology Program
Abstract
Play therapy has long been used to help children express and work through their emotional worlds before they can do so fully through language. Psychoanalytic theorists have argued that play serves not only as a means of communication but also as a therapeutic process in its own right. Drawing on theories of play, object relations, and group dynamics, this paper explores how similar processes may emerge among adults in nonclinical group settings. Using a spontaneous toy soldier prank that developed among college classmates during an intensive psychoanalysis course, I examine how play fostered creative expression, meaning-making, and group cohesion. Through the frameworks of Winnicott, Klein, Bion, Yalom, and Foulkes, I contend that playful group interactions can create a shared symbolic space in which relationships deepen and interpersonal tensions can be worked through.
Keywords: Play, Group dynamics, Psychoanalytic theory, Object relations, Winnicott
Introduction
Playing is central to Donald Winnicott’s (1971) conceptualization of therapy. He viewed play as both a measure of an individual’s capacity to express their true self and an inherently therapeutic process. For Winnicott, this process unfolds within a shared “potential space” between therapist and client. I experienced a comparable process unfold between a prankster and group members. I am introducing this group model through a spontaneous toy soldier prank, illustrating how playful interpersonal interaction can open a shared space and facilitate engagement through a creative process.
A Chicago Prank
I waited until it was safe to strike. No one saw me coming; that was critical. I lined up the soldiers in a battle formation to greet two of my fellow classmates when they returned to their room. An hour later, I heard confused murmurs coming from behind their door. What the…? Who put these tiny men on our desk? Interestingly, nobody admitted to the crime. And when the soldiers later showed up in my other classmates’ backpacks, pillow cases, toothpaste, lemon cake, and even at the bar we frequented, nobody admitted to it either. By the end of week one, the prank had taken on a life of its own, and I didn’t plan on letting up.
One classmate proposed creating a shared document to catalogue the “evidence” and vote on a primary suspect at the end of each week. The accused would then be ethically obligated to admit whether or not they were the perpetrator. Suddenly, my little lark became a mission, and we were the soldiers with a common enemy and a shared purpose.
We were living together in a Chicago hostel for a 3.5-week intensive course on contemporary psychoanalysis, a structure that was inherently intimate and analytic. Each day, a different analyst visited the institute in which class was held to present their work to us. My married professors even held class at their home one day, after which we lingered for an informal conversation with that day’s presenting analyst, sitting scattered across the carpet. The material was both scientific and creative, grounded in established knowledge yet pushing modern boundaries. To say the least, we were bright-eyed with curiosity. We pushed ourselves in class and challenged each other outside of it; we could not get enough. The course muddied academic and social boundaries – an ideal formula for spontaneous play.
Prank or play?
At first, I saw the prank as nothing more than that: a silly, trivial game. However, it soon became clear that it reflected much of what we had been learning about the role of play in psychoanalysis. Only this time, we were living it rather than studying it. The group’s shared atmosphere of creativity, suspicion, and meaning-making mirrored analytic processes with which we were becoming increasingly familiar.
Although play therapy was developed for and adapted to the needs of children in treatment, I would argue that its core principles apply to adults in group settings as well. I saw this unfold in real time, albeit unintentionally, as a result of a group simply having fun. Our spontaneous prank revealed how play can foster connection and emotional safety. In what follows, I draw on psychoanalytic theories of play and group dynamics to understand how a simple prank became a vessel for cohesion and collective growth among a group of young adults.
Play Therapy & Object Relations
Plato viewed play (paidia) as the most natural form of education for children (D’Angour, 2013). Psychoanalysis later recognized play as a kind of language, a way of thinking and feeling through symbols before we have words for them. Play therapy, a psychoanalytic concept dating back to the early 1900s, recognizes the importance of playing pretend for children’s healthy emotional, cognitive, and interpersonal development. It gives children a stage on which to act out internal conflicts, test boundaries, and build trust, first with the therapist, then with others.
Analysts have approached play therapy from many angles, resulting in theories that often overlap with one another. The work of many analysts has contributed to the umbrella theory of object relations, which suggests that the way children interact with “objects” (often representations of important people in their lives) reflects and shapes their relationships. In this sense, play can help children develop healthy relationship dynamics and change maladaptive interpersonal patterns, allowing them to relate differently to others even into adulthood (Koukourikos et al., 2021).
Melanie Klein claimed that play therapy provides analysts with direct access to a child’s unconscious desires, fantasies, and conflicts. For her, a child’s play is the equivalent of an adult’s free association, an expression of unconscious material. She developed the “play technique,” interpreting the metaphors and symbols that appear during play to help children work through the material of their inner worlds (Klein, 1955).
Winnicott took this one step further, emphasizing the creative and relational aspects of play. He introduced the concept of a “transitional object,” such as a blanket, doll, or toy, that helps a child to differentiate between self and other. Through such objects, children learn to individuate while still feeling connected. These objects assist the child through the development of their “true self,” the version of themselves that emerges when they are acting authentically, as opposed to a “false self” that is organized around psychological defenses. Winnicott also described a “potential space” for the true self to be discovered and expressed in, an intermediate area between fantasy and reality where authenticity and creativity can flourish (Winnicott, 1971).
In retrospect, my prank mirrored many of the dynamics described by Klein and Winnicott. The toy soldiers acted almost as transitional objects – tangible stand-ins for our curiosity, suspicion, and group tension. As we brainstormed suspects, we engaged in something akin to free association, with our idiosyncratic experiences of each other influencing our largely subjective reasoning. The game resembled a potential space for our true selves to emerge in a playful, low-stakes setting. Within that space, we were able to project rivalry and symbolically master anxieties without any actual danger.
When Adults Play
The dynamics of play therapy have historically been explored between the child and therapist, but how do these dynamics manifest when play emerges in a group of adults? In groups, play is not just about individual expression; it becomes a living system of relationships. It centers around the interactions and the roles that develop when people come together. The prank, in this sense, was a social experience, a social experiment, even, that revealed how group dynamics can mirror analytic ones.
Group therapy acts as a microcosm of society, allowing members to work through social and emotional struggles, build communication skills, and experience belonging in a safer setting. When a group begins to “play,” it often uncovers the same unconscious processes that individual play does, but now distributed among members. The prank as an informal method of group play ended up helping my classmates and me navigate our relationships and act out tensions in order to achieve real cohesion.
Group Minds at Play
Wilfred Bion’s theory of group mentality allows us to break down the inner workings of a group through the lens of consciousness. He proposed that groups operate on two levels simultaneously: The “work group”, focused on its task, and the “basic assumption group,” driven by unconscious emotional needs that derail the group from its task (Bion, 2003). While our conscious task was to study psychoanalysis, our unconscious task became managing the anxiety of evaluation and belonging. The toy soldier game provided a container for that tension, a means of expressing it figuratively. However, in contrast with Bion’s understanding of play, our “basic assumption play” wasn’t counterproductive – it granted us permission to express ourselves in a way that brought us together.
Irvin Yalom might describe our group dynamics as a demonstration of his “here-and-now” principle. Through feedback and self-disclosure, members create new shared experiences, allowing them to change their maladaptive patterns in the here-and-now. Yalom posited that through “acting out”, or reliving past conflicts in a protective environment, the therapist’s and other members’ responses can help “correct” emotional damage (Yalom, 1995). While our interactions were not literal therapy, each reaction to the soldiers served as interpersonal feedback, data points on how we related to one another and the material we were learning. Furthermore, in discussing and dissecting elements of the prank, we practiced Yalom’s core therapeutic factors, including interpersonal learning, universality, cohesion and catharsis. Although living with your psychoanalysis class is a particularly intense, immersive setting, Yalom might recognize it as the ideal setting to work through interpersonal conflict.
Foulkes’ idea of the “group matrix” deepens this picture. The matrix represents the shared unconscious communication between group members from which meaning arises. The fact that the therapy takes place within a group is, for Foulkes, the main treatment tool (Foulkes, 1964). Every hidden soldier, every new “attack,” every shared whisper about who might be behind it fed that matrix; these moments all became a part of a shared narrative that lived in creative dialogue and storytelling.
Rules & Rituals
Groups often form around a shared interest. In our case, this was psychoanalysis; we were strung together simply by having signed up to take the same course. However, what sustains a group is less formal: the rituals, unpredictable jokes, and spontaneous games that breathe life into a collection of individuals. We spent a month in that hostel in Chicago, and looking back, it seems as if the prank strengthened the group’s cohesion in a way that the course content would not have been able to do alone.
Jean Piaget would call this a shift into a “concrete operational” mode of play – one where rules and cooperation begin to matter as much as imagination (Piaget, 1952). Our “vote-out” regulations mirrored real group processes like scapegoating and projection in a symbolic, manageable form. The toy soldiers gave us structure and freedom simultaneously. Those unserious moments allowed us to think critically and creatively, to laugh within an intense analytic environment, and to relieve the tension that inevitably arises when a group of young adults spend nearly every waking hour together. The prank may have seemed minor at first, but it revealed the major ways in which play could strengthen and sustain a group.
Bundt Cake
As the course came to a close, so did the game. The “reveal” felt like terminating a therapeutic relationship: bittersweet but necessary. Toward the end of our time together, the class gathered for a goodbye dinner at a classmate’s house with analysts and professors in attendance. One attendee had generously baked a lemon bundt cake, which I took as a final opportunity. I placed maybe 50 soldiers in the hollowed-out center of the cake. When the top was lifted, the table fell silent for a moment before erupting in laughter. It was theatrical and absurd, and a symbolic close to something that we all had put time and effort into.
After weeks of alternating between moving quietly and framing (and playfully defaming) potential suspects, I had started dropping hints of my culpability, letting a few people catch on, until it was time for the final vote-out later that evening. Some of those who knew of my guilt felt “in on it” during that last meeting and looked the other way, while others jumped at the opportunity to vote me out. In the end, I was outed by one vote. And it was perfectly calculated.
C-Springs
The relationships we formed as a class carried over once we returned to campus in Colorado Springs. In how many classes does the group chat stay alive after termination? The “matrix” we had built in Chicago was so emotionally charged that we even tried to recreate it back on campus, hosting a few biweekly group therapy sessions. That didn’t last very long; without a licensed clinician, this was probably for the best. Regardless, our efforts said something about how much we missed the “potential space” we had created for ourselves.
Over time, the soldiers disappeared into drawers and backpacks. Yet even now, years later, my friends and I reference them when we reconnect, as if their impact was heavier than one may assume from a light bag of figurines. Maybe that’s the subtle magic of play; it suspends us between fantasy and reality, between past and present. In psychoanalysis, that liminal space is where insight often occurs. And, maybe it’s what held us, long after the game was over.
References
Bion, W. R. (2003). Experiences in groups: And other papers. Taylor & Francis.
D’Angour, A. (2013). Plato and play: Taking education seriously in ancient Greece. American Journal of Play, 5(3), 293–307. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=Ej1016076
Foulkes, S. H. (1964). Therapeutic group analysis. Allen and Unwin. (Reprinted 1984, London: Karnac Books.)
Klein, M. (1955). The psychoanalytic play technique. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 25(2), 223–237. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1939-0025.1955.tb00131.x
Koukourikos, K., Tsaloglidou, A., Tzeha, L., Iliadis, C., Frantzana, A., Katsimbeli, A., & Kourkouta, L. (2021). An overview of play therapy. Materia Socio Medica, 33(4),
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